Why are Human Beings of Greater Worth than Chimpanzees or Rattlesnakes?

In my previous entry, Christian Misuse of the Concept of ‘Person’, I spoke of the need for Christians to give higher priority to revealed truths even at the cost of eliminating some arguments which seem of practical value in protecting human life. That leaves open the question given in the title of this entry. Why, indeed, is human life of greater worth than the lives of other sorts of biological creatures?

Let me seemingly divert to a question which turns out to be the same. Why did Jesus Christ, the Son of God, accept baptism? Surely, He didn’t need to be baptized. He bore our sins but was Himself free of all sin. The second antiphon for the Morning Prayer, (Liturgy of the Hours — modern Roman Catholic version) on the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord tells us what occurred when the sinless Lord of Creation entered those waters to be baptized by one of His own creatures:

Springs of water were made holy as Christ revealed his glory to the world. Draw water from the fountain of the Savior, for Christ our God has hallowed all creation.

Water is good in its natural qualities. It refreshes and cleans. It’s all-important to life on earth because it irrigates so effectively, bringing in nutrients and carrying away wastes.

It’s fitting that the Lord chose such a substance to play a role in baptism, a rite in which we’re cleansed as we move towards salvation. But we must remember that water as a natural substance isn’t the source of the grace which can lead us to salvation. That grace is in the waters of baptism, when united with the proper words — I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — because that grace flows out of the Lord Jesus Christ and into the waters of the world and that flow of grace began when the Son of God let His human body be baptized with water.

Human beings, in and of themselves, are a particular species of physical animal. In a moral sense, we’re not so high above our fellow-animals as some would think. For example, we have our instincts which make us reluctant to kill other human beings but wolves have stronger instincts against killing members of their own species. (See the book On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman for a fascinating discussion of this entire issue.)

We men are morally superior to other animals in our ability to abstract from our moral instincts and to produce moral systems of thought and behavior. This general ability to think abstractly and the consequent ability to raise ourselves above our environments, vaguely seeing the possibilities of a Creation and a Creator, is probably the reason we can please God as companions, here and in the world of the resurrected.

Our Creator decided to offer us that chance to be His companions on the other side of our graves and that offer was made in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Human life became qualitatively different from other forms of life when the Son of God took on human flesh, being born as the defenseless human baby who was named Jesus by His mother, Mary, and His foster father, Joseph.

The Incarnation didn’t happen because human flesh was already holy and somehow worthy of providing the stuff of a creaturely nature for Christ. It was Christ who made human nature holy by becoming one of us, just as He made the waters of the earth holy and suitable for our baptisms. He had already given us the great gift of natural life and then He chose to offer us life without end as His companions.

Getting back to the value of human life, this is the situation of men without Christ:

Men tend to place a high value on the lives of other human beings but far from an absolute value.

The Romans of the Republic had a harsh moral and legal code which they tended to follow far more faithfully than modern Christians follow their professed beliefs. Historians have written that those Romans knew that abortion was murder but those hardheaded and virtuous pagans could handle hard cases without feeling the need to justify themselves. They were willing to break their own laws or moral beliefs if there seemed to be a strong practical reason to kill a baby in the womb or to kill a misbehaving adult who was a threat to the clan, but they didn’t feel a need to turn a crime into a social good in order to justify themselves. I repeat:

Men tend to place a high value on the lives of other human beings but far from an absolute value.

That is about as good as it gets on the basis of our natural instincts and our natural reasoning. Unfortunately, we have to understand that the non-Christians of our society aren’t being deliberately thickheaded or evil when they deny that all human life, all that might be human life when we don’t know for sure, has absolute value. Each and every human beings is an end in and of himself and it’s wrong for other human beings treat him as a means to their ends.

For centuries, we of the West have fooled ourselves. We collaborated with the modern Deists and other sorts of pagans in trying to keep what was good in the Christian West by deriving revealed truths through processes of natural reasoning. We continued to worship as Christians on Sunday while paganizing our political and social systems, even our basic moral codes, on the other six days of the week.

Some of the moral catastrophes of the modern West are due to the fact that we aren’t a mixture of Christians and pagans as so many believe. We’re a mixture of Christians and pagans and paganized Christians. Those paganized Christians deal poorly with the hard case morality which arises naturally in pagan societies and they feel the need to feel justified and saved in the way of their Christian ancestors. They can’t just murder human babies in cases where there is some true hardship. They have to turn the murder of human babies into a social and moral good just because of the moral attitudes they inherited from their Christian ancestors, attitudes now severed from Christian belief. Now, we have some more honest sorts of pagans, not necessarily of the virtuous sort, who bluntly deny any absolute moral rules and claim the right to use one human being as means to meet the ends or needs of another human being. This may be the sign that we’ve reached the end of the political and social systems which gave worth to every human life no matter how humble.

We got to this point partly because so many well-intentioned Christians joined in the efforts of modern pagan thinkers to retain the moral beliefs of Christianity while getting rid of the Person of Christ. The absoluteness of Christian morality which comes from the Incarnation was dangerously and weakly justified on purely natural grounds.

The inevitable has happened. Nature herself doesn’t give us any reason to believe human beings are so much different from other animals as we imagine. The fraudulent effort to turn some of the revealed truths of Christianity into products of natural human reasoning failed and those who see absolute value in human life now engage in ridiculous and childish arguments with those who are willing to see other human beings as means to their ends.

Human life has absolute value right from conception.

Does not.

It does.

Does not.

It’s time to start with the core of revealed truths and the huge unorganized piles of modern empirical knowledge and first learn how to tell the story of Christ and His brethren in a way that makes sense of both revealed truths and empirical knowledge. Once we have a plausible version of the story being told by God, the story which is our world, we can begin to live once more as Christians no matter the cost we have to pay to be true to our Savior. Then maybe we can return to the Christian vocation of spreading the Good News of Christ.

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